Chains of Redemption (7 page)

He'd rather die fighting, and so had they. That was the choice they had all, every one of them, made.

He pushed gently away from Diana, dried the tears from her face with his fist, and then dried his own tears. He took a deep breath and looked into her eyes.

"You are amazing."

Diana looked more than a little confused, "Me? But, what . . ."

He put a finger over her lips. "Shush." He moved his finger and kissed her lips gently. "Don't say anything else. I remembered something RJ said. She said I had to live a normal life for all of them. That's more true now than ever." He took her hand, and she stood up and followed him to their room.

Poley didn't lose track of time. He wished he could because it would have made life easier. As it was he was fully aware of the one week, two days, three hours and forty-seven minutes that had passed since he'd sealed the others into their cryogenic sleeping chambers.

It had only taken him a few hours to secure everything on the ship so that it wouldn't be floating around free when he turned the artificial gravity off. Now he wished he had taken his time, stretched the duty out. Of course he couldn't do that because the artificial gravity took more energy than the life support; more energy, in fact, than everything except the actual propulsion of the ship.

So now it was off and he was wearing gravity boots, which was all he really needed to walk around the ship without bumping off walls, ceilings and floors. Weightlessness didn't affect him like it did a human. He was, of course, incapable of losing muscle mass since he didn't have muscles. Bouncing around in zero-gee did, however, screw with his internal gyros, making it hard to control his movements and the direction in which he was trying to go. While he wasn't as easily broken as a flesh and blood being, he could still take damage, and certainly his body bouncing into things could break them. Poley couldn't afford to damage anything, and he sure didn't want to hurt himself. He had to take care of everything, maintain himself and the ship regularly, and make sure he stopped to recharge when necessary, because they were all counting on him. He was in charge.

He was lonely.

Poley walked to the bridge to check the data boards again, though he knew the chances that they were any closer to an Earth-type planet since he had looked five minutes ago were forty six million four hundred nine thousand to one.

He sighed, something that seemed to help the humans deal with stress, but didn't see why it worked for them.

He wondered if what he was feeling actually was stress.

He missed his sister, he missed having her ask him questions, listen to his answers, and then make decisions that seemed in many cases to go directly against the data he had given her. He guessed the emotion he felt because she trusted him to take over the ship and to make all the decisions himself was pride. Further, Poley calculated that the anxious feeling he got when he thought he might let them down was caused by a fear of failure.

And he was sure that all the reasons he kept calculating for why he should wake them up added up to only one thing—he was lonely.

And bored.

He started drumming his fingers on the console, listening to the rhythm of the drumming. He did this for three hours, fourteen minutes and twenty-three seconds.

What else did he have to do? Not too much went wrong with a ship when most of the systems were turned off. Once every two or three months he'd have to transport some more of the radioactive gold to the fusion reactor, but even after using all the precautionary measures and equipment it wouldn't take him more than a couple of hours.

He found himself wishing it took longer to recharge, because it was the same for him as the humans sleep cycle. A time when he wasn't really thinking, just shut down, recharging till his internal alarm told him he'd had enough.

He had interacted with them every day for an average of ten hours a day, for eight years, six months, eleven days, six hours and thirty-two minutes. Before that he'd always been with Stewart. Now he had nothing but the running of the ship and the search for their home space and/or an inhabitable planet to occupy his vast mind and his time. The real problem being that there was no action he could take to make a habitable planet jump onto their scanners, and the ship more or less ran itself.

Boredom.

He was sure Topaz would have made some joke about a robot being bored, Levits would have laughed and when Poley looked hurt—and he had learned very quickly how to do that, and just what it could get him—and RJ would tell them to lay off.

These random thoughts made him miss them all the more.

He needed to find something to do, anything to occupy the hours he would otherwise spend trying to figure out good excuses to wake the others up.

On Earth he had carved things, and RJ always praised his carvings. He searched the ship for twenty-four hours but found nothing he could carve up that might not be of use to them when they landed on a planet—if only he hadn't carved it up that is. His practicality didn't allow him to even consider doing damage to something they might actually need later.

He leaned against the wall with a deep sigh. He still didn't feel any better. Nothing. He had nothing to do but run the ship and check the scanners for suitable planets, which took maybe one hour of a twenty-four hour day.

He'd go crazy. He was sure they'd all have some joke about that. He wondered what a robot's mental breakdown would be like and envisioned frayed fiber optics and charred circuits. This made him smile for a minute, then he frowned. It wasn't really funny. He needed something to do, some task to carry out. After all, that was his function. But there was nothing.

Then he saw the long, bare white walls of the hall. He knew it was just paint over a metal surface. He smiled his best mechanical smile, dug his carving knife from his pocket and started to scrape it along the walls. It left a silver line in the otherwise white walls, but it couldn't actually be considered damage since it didn't weaken the ship. He had found his canvas, and this time he wouldn't make a geometric shape. He missed his sister most, so he would etch a picture of her into the wall. He smiled again. She would be humming; she liked to hum, even though she wasn't terribly good at it.

Right watched in disgust as Jessica shoved the shit covered, stinking sack into their shower.

"Jessica, what on Pete are you playing at?" he demanded for the fifth time, though he was sure he knew. Only two short days ago the searches and interrogations had stopped. After having beaten half the population and totally intimidated the other half the Argy had finally admitted defeat and were punishing the entire population of the village by docking the amount paid for buckets of ore until the debt of the stolen computer was paid off. Or until the Argy government felt they had all been duly punished for the theft.

Jessica ignored him and continued cleaning the bag.

"Jessica, if that is what I think it is . . . if you're caught with it . . . if we're caught with it."

"We aren't going to be. They've stopped looking for it. We're all paying for it . . ."

"Some people have died, Jess."

"So . . . people die for lesser causes every day. Don't pretend to care. How many lives did you destroy as Governor General Right? Did you even care? No, you didn't give one good damn, and those were your people. Don't try to force me into some hypocritical moral dilemma, Right. We both know that your only real motivation for doing so is that you've figured out that I am no longer blind to the suffering of others and you hope to sway me to bury this thing before someone finds out I have it and tortures you to death. The damage to the populace has been done, some have died, and many have suffered and will continue to suffer. If I bury this now it will have all been for nothing. I knew of the possible consequences when I stole it and deduced that in fact the end did justify the means, as with this I can start to put things right. So shut the fuck up, stay out of my way, and out of my business."

Right watched as Jessica carefully unwrapped the items in question. Even clean the sack smelled awful, and so for that matter did the shower. Right threw the sack into the trash and then scrubbed the shower out. Even expelling this small amount of energy made him weak. Less money for ore meant less money for protein, and less protein meant the worms would move on up his body. She didn't care. She didn't care about all the others who had suffered for her theft, and she sure as hell didn't care about him.

He walked across the small room and sat down, exhausted. He watched as Jessica went to work tinkering with the electronic equipment like a child with a new toy.

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"Find out what I need to know," she answered vaguely, and
shut up and leave me alone
was implied.

That was it; whatever her plan was he wasn't to be part of it. She had hidden the fact that she had the equipment in the first place, and now she wasn't going to tell him why she had it. She was leaving him out of the loop, because she didn't trust him to be able to mask his feelings under questioning. Though part of him knew he was safer if he didn't know, it still hurt that she didn't trust him after all this time.

Right had become accustomed to constant pain these last few horrible years as the worms made a meal of his leg. He could feel every move they made as they squirmed their way around his body. It was an indescribable pain, and one he had to deal with alone.

He wasn't allowed to converse with, or even have light contact with, the Argy they shared the planet with, because Jessica felt his Argy wasn't good enough to pass for a local, and his emotions were too easily read. So he had no external outlet. Jessica's answer to his pain was to offer to put him out of his misery on a regular basis. She said she'd changed, and she had. He'd watched, in fact he'd had a front row seat as Jessica Kirk had slowly gone completely and totally insane. There were moments of clarity, but there were no truly sane moments with her any more.

She believed that she had developed a conscience that she didn't formerly have. Truly believed that she had gained enlightenment. Life on Pete had been her personal hell. A way of clearing away the demons of the evil she had committed in the name of the Reliance.

Right certainly felt as if he'd paid, and paid, and paid.

Jessica hadn't been through the crap he'd been through. Her perfect body hadn't been invaded by parasites. But she was still sure she'd done enough time in hell. She'd been punished, and now she wanted . . . what, exactly?

Where could they go? Where besides this hateful planet could they hide? They had come here in the first place because they'd been completely out of options.

He knew then why Jessica had stolen the equipment. Jessica was going to start looking for options.

Jessica had all but given up on the pile of electronic crap. At one point she was sure that she would never to be able to boost it enough to get the range she needed, much less hack into Reliance communications. About the time she was ready to throw it back into the shit from whence it had come, she found that one missing piece that had eluded her. Within hours she had managed to hack into just the right Reliance data port.

She smiled triumphantly. The idiots hadn't even bothered to change the codes since she'd defected. Of course, they didn't actually expect people to be able to store streams of code in their heads.

RJ was still missing and the Reliance was still claiming to have killed her and her entire crew. No mention was made of her jump out of hyperspace. She found no data to indicate that any ship had entered Reliance or Argy space from 'the frontier.' Certainly there was no data to indicate that RJ's ship had surfaced anywhere in charted space. No unauthorized landings, no audio contact, nothing. For all intents and purposes RJ was gone.

The New Alliance had apparently absorbed a bunch of Beta 4 humanoids that the Reliance had tried to build into an army to fight the New Alliance. The delightful irony of the news almost made Jessica laugh. The New Alliance had also absorbed the entire planet of Beta 4 and its orbiting satellite Pam Station into their growing empire.

David Grant had apparently stayed on Beta 4, no doubt to act as an ambassador for the New Alliance on the newly acquired planet.

Pam Station had been the last place that RJ had been 'alive'. As such, Jessica badly needed to hack into the system there. It turned out to be harder to breach this system than it had been to get into the Reliance military mainframe because of some New Alliance system code named MARGE—Jessica was still trying to figure out what the letters stood for—which kept putting up blocks. It wasn't until she tried a completely different approach—actually with the help of Argy technology—that she was able to get through at all. When she did, she finally had the information she most needed.

Jessica had expected RJ to be accompanied by Poley, but she'd known very little about the man named Levits and even less about the man they called Topaz. Kirsty, the spy who had infiltrated the new Alliance and handed Alsterase to Jessica on a silver platter, had known very little about them, because RJ had never actually trusted the girl.